How to Spend 24 Hours in Naples, According to a Local

“Naples is surprising because you see an extraordinary amount of beautiful things in a mile, but unlike in Rome, they don’t hit you in the face,” says the Turin-born designer Allegra Hicks of the city she’s lived in part-time for the past five years. Naples is gradually shedding a reputation for grit and grime, due in part to its growing arts scene (the London gallery Thomas Dane opened here in January), prompting more visitors to seek out its centuries-old treasures, like the National Archaeological Museum’s stellar collection of Greek and Roman antiquities. The city’s magnificent churches and palazzos, often hidden behind discreet doors on narrow streets, can feel like discoveries in a city known as the gateway to the Amalfi. “The route through the old town gives you a sense of the city as both grand and dilapidated,” Hicks says. Travelers killing time before the ferry to Capri can do it all in an afternoon.

Allegra's Afternoon in Naples

You will want to start at Piazza del Gesù Nuovo and walk past the 14th-century palazzos on Via Benedetto Croce, a long, narrow street. You’ll reach the Gay-Odin pastry shop, which opened in the 1800s and smells divine. Across the street is the Monastero di Santa Chiara, where Hicks likes to stop in for its calming courtyard with orange trees. Farther up the street is Scaturchio, a gilded bakery whose Il Babà Vesuvio, Naples’s famous cake, is shaped like Vesuvius; around the corner is the Museo Cappella Sansevero, though you’ll need advance tickets to see the marble statue Veiled Christ, by the master Sanmartino.

Next you’ll pass the convent Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco, a fabulous Baroque structure, and down the street, the Chiesa dei Girolamini, west of Via Duomo.
The building is slightly derelict but has an extraordinary library with books mostly from the 15th and 16th centuries. Continue up the road to the Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro, which was a thank-you from ruling royals, including the Bourbons, to Naples’s patron saint. (It’s rumored that the collection is more valuable than any in Russia.) Next door in the Pio Monte della Misericordia chapel you’ll find Naples’s most important artwork, The Seven Works of Mercy, the only Caravaggio here that has never been allowed to leave the city. You have to go to Naples to see it.